Malware and Capitalism

Some of us can still remember a time when running antiviral software was a luxury and spyware scanners weren't even a sparkle in any coder's eye. We would occasionally hear about some horrible virus on the way, but more often than not we'd end up with a simple hoax or at least an exaggeration.

Occasionally, a real threat would rear its head. When this happened, I'd always get the same question from the people I knew: why would anyone want to make a computer virus? My most likely answer was usually to get attention. Of course, my friends and I always had our pet theories about the antivirus companies being behind them. While I don't believe that to have ever been the case, I think we were on to something closer to the truth than we could possibly have realized at the time.